Subject: bug#49901: Bug in build c-ares [too many loops]

From: Brad House <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2021 11:17:47 -0400

I'm one of the maintainers of the c-ares project at 
https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares and have had a couple of users report 
this issue.  At first glance it appears to be an issue introduced 
between automake 1.16.1 and 1.16.3.

I actually did some testing on MacOS 11.4 with automake 1.16.4 and can 
reproduce the issue.  Whereas 1.16.1 on CentOS 8 it works fine. I 
haven't tried backing off automake to 1.16.1 on MacOS.

Reported issues for c-ares are here:

https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/issues/409
https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/issues/416

Rerunning autoreconf -fi appears to succeed, but then when building 
after configure, make immediately throws an error so it clearly didn't 
actually work.

The autotools build hasn't been touched in years short of a code 
reorganization a year or so ago.

I haven't had time yet to investigate if there is an older version of 
c-ares that works with the newer automake to try to figure out a trigger.

I know this isn't much information to go off of, but the user just told 
me they had opened this issue so I wanted to chime in as I'm not sure 
when I'll have a chance to investigate further.

-Brad